Posts by Category: hardware

One of the benefits of working from home must be the freedom that comes from arranging things exactly how you want them, and the fact that that a pointy haired boss isn’t peering over your shoulder every 10 minutes. But for some people there’s clearly such a thing as ‘too much’ freedom.

So look, the Dutch clearly like doing things properly. None of your half measures where they’re concerned. So instead of installing some quaint little wood burner stove, these guys have gone and designed a wood burner that actually burns a whole tree trunk. Mind boggling!

When it comes to inventing new ways to protect yourself and incapacitate others, there are few people able to do it as efficiently as the Swiss. But what do you expect from a country that invented yodeling and cuckoo clocks? Take this innocent looking ‘less than lethal’ JPX Pepper Gun for instance. We would assume that 9 times out of 10 you’ll never have to pull the trigger, just wave it around a bit. And if you do use it,…

You’ve got to hand it to the clever Chinese, they know how to enjoy themselves in a collective way. Just look at this very cosy 4.7 Meter Electric Bicycle, which can hold up to 9 people comfortably as it presumably stutters along the road. We say presumably because we’re wondering how many batteries you need to haul that amount of cargo on just two wheels?

Look, we were perfectly happy when the robots came for us in Terminator, because, well you know, that was a movie. And we chuckled along with the rest of the world when cute little Wall-E glittered onto our screens. But dude, this stuff is supposed to remain fiction, not real world, cringe inducing fact. But now it is.

The Raspberry Pi just got some serious competition. Brit developers Imagination has just released a new development system, called the MIPS Creator C120, which offers some serious functionality on a board. And what’s more they’re putting their money where their mouth is by offering the systems free of charge to all suitable projects. Just visit the site and enter in your details. [Update: the site is apparently down right now. Who would have thought it?]

When you think about it, the phrase ‘drag up a chair’ kind of sums up our relationship with these common seating tools. We put up with having to drag them around the place, when in reality it would be much better if we could just wear them, wouldn’t it? Well hey, now there’s a new Swiss invention which may just let that happen.

It took us a while to work out what was different about this new budget bicycle, but after we clicked, we were instantly impressed. The designer of the Priority Bicycle has completely done away with all the messy and complicated bits on conventional bikes, and produced something that is as clean and functional as anything you’ll see on the streets today.

In case you hadn’t heard, food is getting more expensive, mostly due to rising harvesting, shipping, and processing costs. One answer to the problem has been to start looking at alternative, more local and efficient ways to produce food for communities wherever they are, and Aquaponics looks like a solid solution. The system marries aquaculture (aka fish farming) with hydroponics, to deliver fresh home grown vegetables along with fish supplies when needed.

Buried amongst all the headline hoop-la about Google’s self-driving cars, there’s a steady stream of interesting snippets from various car manufacturers who are clearly working towards some sort of radical future for the automobile. The era of the driverless car looks as though it’s going to be a part of our lives sometime soon, whether we like it or not.

Will we ever live in a robot infested future? More to the point, would we like to live in one? These are questions that the people in Japan are probably asking right now, as their country introduces increasing numbers of robots into the market. The latest one however has a rather interesting job to do.

If you’re one of the lucky people who have a robot servant of some sort in your home, whether it’s a Roomba, Neato or other sweeper/cleaner machine, then you really need to know where to go in case of trouble. Sure you can approach the manufacturers or retailers, but there are other options.

We can’t imagine what it must be like to live in a place where you need to worry whether the floor is going to disappear from under your feet, or there’s going to be a ton of building falling on top of you at any moment. We guess you tend to forget about the possibility after a while, and just get on with things.

The new Microsoft Surface 2 4G tablet computer is the latest in the line of Windows tablets from the Redmond giant, but this time it comes with the neat addition of high speed mobile Internet built in, which means you can tablet yourself anywhere you can find a cell signal. Goodbye to the WiFi ball and chain.

We’re completely out of flying car jokes by now, since they’re so obviously not sitting outside waiting to pick us up for the shopping trip. But even so, we’re getting close to a time when we may actually see some exotic craft in the air over our heads. They may not hold all the shopping, but they do look like fun.